Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia

Politics and Culture in Modern America

by Matthew J. Countryman

Up South traces the efforts of two generations of black Philadelphians to turn the City of Brotherly Love into a place of promise and opportunity for all. Although Philadelphia rarely appears in histories of the modern civil rights struggle, the city was home to a vibrant and groundbreaking movement for racial justice in the years between World War II and the 1970s. By broadening the chronological and geographic parameters of the civil rights movement, Up South explores the origins of civil rights liberalism, the failure of the liberal program of antidiscrimination legislation and interracial coalition-building to deliver on its promise of racial equality, and the subsequent rise of the Black Power movement.

The Philadelphia movement occurred in three stages. During the 1940s and 1950s, liberal civil rights groups in the city successfully campaigned for Philadelphia's new City Charter to be the first in the nation to include a ban on racial discrimination in municipal employment, services, and contracts. Within a decade, however, black activists in the city were leading consumer boycotts and street protests against the city's liberal establishment for failing to overcome entrenched structures of racial inequality in labor markets, residential neighborhoods, and public schools. These protests set the stage both for some of the earliest experiments in affirmative action and for the emergence of the Black Power movement in Philadelphia.

Challenging the view that it was the inflammatory rhetoric of Black Power and the rising demands of black activists that derailed the civil rights movement, Up South documents the efforts of Black Power activists in Philadelphia to construct a vital and effective social movement that combined black nationalism's analysis of racism's constitutive role in American society with a program of grassroots community organizing and empowerment. On issues ranging from public education and urban renewal to police brutality and welfare, Philadelphia's Black Power movement remade the city's political landscape. And, in contrast to the top-down middle-class leadership of traditional civil rights groups, Black Power in Philadelphia fundamentally altered the composition of black leadership in the city to include a new cohort of neighborhood-based working-class and female black community activists.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Urban Studies, Social Justice, Historical, Politics

432 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

Matthew Countryman is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia by Matthew Countryman is a detailed study of politics, racial oppression, and organizing social movement in Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s. I live across the state line and have been listening to details of Philadelphia happenings since moving to the region in 1998. However, Countryman’s book has given me a framework for understanding the slow movement of racial progress, the lack of patronage jobs, the impact of Levittown and jobs growth outside the city, and the efforts for change that begins with a new charter in 1951. Yet people try the New Deal, but it does not work in really bringing an end to racial injustice. There are many actors here-a alliance of liberal folks in the government but still a refusal to share power with Black actors.

Inspired by others, there are various forms of Black Power that speak to the police brutality that people faced, including high school students. Of course, there are limited employment opportunities, but many Black people are in public sector jobs, since the route to private sector work is complex. Leon Sullivan uses ministers, like himself, to established boycotts of goods to get businesses to hire more than a few Black workers. These campaigns had some impact, yet what was really needed was significant job training. The vocational high schools had public funding but did not have Black students in the union apprenticeship programs. Sullivan works for an alternative, a model that gets replicated in other eras.

The liberal government had to protect and serve the Black population, but everything they did meant to aid them meant they lost votes from the White ethnic working class. Myths and misinformation are part of the picture, which enables Rizzo to link crime and poor schools with Black people. Yet, there is a sense of entitlement that White people had and did not want their lives changed. I never understood how Rizzo rose in power, first in the police force and then as mayor, so I see the many starts and failures that give him the means to identify the situation and gain power.

There are class differences, as the NAACP and other groups were viewed as the realm of Black professionals, not the working class. Cecil Moore does work to redefine the NAACP and recruit more of the working class, but there are still tensions. Countryman pays attention to grassroots leaders, who often inspire youth and divert their energy from gangs. Women are key in this picture, often organizing around schools, health and housing—especially Model Cities and challenging police violence. We see how national changes, like Nixon coming to power changes the call for maximum feasible participation and the federal apparatus goes back to the old model of sending funds to the typical social welfare groups. There are many struggles, but people have to unite to make change and eventually the city ends Rizzo’s reign, including voting down a change in the charter for him to serve three terms. Wilson Goode is the first Black mayor, but Black people have many seats at the table.

I can see how some of the actors who are still on the scene got their start and I better understand the obstacles to bringing racial justice and equality to Philadelphia. Not that any city I have lived in has met those goals.

[Drick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has filled a gap in my understanding of the history of Philadelphia from an African American perspective. From the late 1940s to the mid-1980s, Countryman chronicles the campaigns to gain political power in the Black community under the leadership of Leon Sullivan, Cecil B. Moore, and various Black Power political groups seeking to change policies and open doors of opportunity and influence in how Black people were treated. Also chronicled are the mayoral terms of ____ Tate and Frank Rizzo as Police commissioner and then mayor.

While this was a difficult read because of the detailed density of the text, the plurality of organizational abbreviations, and the variety of individuals and organizations that worked to improve the status and increase the power to influence of Blacks in the City

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matthew Countryman’s Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, published in 2006, traced the enfolding struggle of African Americans against legal and economic discrimination from the 1940s through the early 1980s. At the heart of Countryman’s account is the shifting allegiance of black activists from civil rights liberalism to Black Power; a pivot unfolding in Philadelphia in the early and middle years of the 1960s which reflected both continuity in the evolving approach of experienced activists and discontinuity in the rising militancy of a new generation. “Despite Philadelphia’s invisibility within civil rights historiography,” Countryman tells us, “the city was home to one of the most successful campaigns for black civil rights in the nation during the 1940s and 1950s.” Turning heavily on elite organization through the NAACP, political advocacy was coupled with legal challenges, based on the 14th and 15th amendments, to discriminatory laws. “It was this constitutionalist stand – that blacks and other racial minorities benefit more from efforts to protect individual rights than from efforts to promote group interests – that came to form the core of civil rights liberalism.” While the 1950s non-discrimination victories won stable employment and access to suburban housing for some, the vast majority of the city’s black residents remained trapped in deteriorating neighborhoods with inferior public services and worsening employment prospects.

Countryman conceptualizes the growing rift between liberals and Philadelphia’s rising black nationalists as driven by class: middle class African Americans who had individually benefited from non-discrimination measures, and a working class residentially confined and swollen by new arrivals from the South who were rapidly becoming an underclass. While not self-identifying as black nationalists, Countryman asserts the leaders of the mid-60s working class protests were just that in all but name, due to their rejection of interracial cooperation and emphasis on community based solutions to elevate the group economically and socially. Many of the experiments which arose from this period in Philadelphia proved influential for the War on Poverty programs initiated under President Johnson and carried forward by the Nixon administration. Focused on group advancement through affirmative action, black business development and job training, these programs conceptualized the difficulties of urban blacks as a lack of development in capital and skills and sought to redress the deficiency with active measures. In discussing the rejection of an interracial politics of equal opportunity, Countryman sheds no tears. The rhetoric of equal rights, he asserts, had simply disguised the continued defense of white privilege in Philadelphia’s politics and, housing and labor markets. It was therefore “ironic, though not surprising, that black activists’ efforts to use race as the explicit basis for political and community organization provided the rationale for the reemergence of an avowedly white racial politics in the city.” The stubborn persistence of racism among working class whites across generations, rather than any developments within the Democratic Party or the black community, he suggests, is the real culprit for the unraveling of the New Deal coalition. “In this sense,” he continues, “entrenched white support for racialized hierarchies within public institutions like the Philadelphia public schools was as much a cause of urban violence of the late 1960s as black radical activism.”

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was not quite what I expected, but I'm not sure what I was expecting. The strength of Up South is that it gives a broad overview of the 1940s-60s civil rights/black power movement in Philadelphia, which was very helpful for me as someone who wanted to learn more about the history of the city I'm living in, especially about the race relations which I knew had been historically tense.

The book captures a really interesting narrative from postwar liberalism to early-60s protest, to late-60s radicalism, to 70s electoral politics. Along the way we meet some of the most important players, like Cecil B. Moore, Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization, and Council of Organizations Philadelphia Police Accountability and Responsibility (COPPAR). We learn a bit about their strategies, we learn about the white backlash and Frank Rizzo, and attempts by the system to co-opt and dilute the movement through politics and money.

However, the book also lacks in some substantial ways. For one thing, the author is a professor in Michigan, who as far as I know is not from Philadelphia and is not black. This doesn't mean he has nothing valuable to contribute from his research, but it does mean the writing is overly academic and emotionally detached.

My other major complaint is that while the book doesn't heat up until about pg. 120 with chapter 4, the conclusion is way too short and very unsatisfying. It's only 1 page, front and back, and only hints at the issues which are crying out to be examined.

For example, did the huge protests and deep radicalism of the late 60s really get co-opted into pointless electoral campaigns? How is that possible, and why did it happen?

Why wasn't there sustained grassroots pressure to hold the newly-elected black politicans accountable, or if there was, why did it fail?

How did the Rizzo Mayorship of the 70s affect the black freedom movement in Philly? In what ways did Rizzo gain greater power in moving from his position as Police Commissioner, and in what ways was he held more accountable as Mayor? More generally, how much did it matter who was in charge of the city government, as far as the movements were concerned?

These are just a few questions that I wish had been addressed in the book more substantially, but I think the fact that the book left me wanting to know more actually points to the success of the book in captivating my interest.

This wasn't the holistic and movement-centered study that I was looking for, but it helped me clarify my questions on the subject so I recommend it for anyone living in Philadelphia and wanting to know more about the history of their city.

[zack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matthew Countryman’s Up South presents one of the tightest arguments I’ve read in grad school thus far. In some form or another, Countryman restates his thesis in almost every section, continuously drilling Philadelphia’s significance—as well as the bridge-building capabilities of the city’s variety of the Black Power movement—into the reader’s brain. In many ways, I found the book to be a careful analysis of Black Power rather than its specific role in Philadelphia, and that was a large part of what worked. As Countryman notes, the movement is often dismissed as destructive, but his introspective take handles the situation with more objectivity: he’s explicitly interested in vindicating it rather than dismissing it as a factor in the decline of the Civil Rights Movement. His research, whether it’s deconstructing the significance of the NAACP or the rise and fall of the student protest movement, is incredibly detailed and quantitative.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I wasn’t a huge fan. Up South presents itself from the beginning as a case study of Philadelphia, but it feels startlingly impersonal. Countryman’s focus on the quantifiable data and legal statistics of Black Power detracts from the extensive human element hidden in his narrative. This stood out in particular in chapter seven, when his description of female roles in the movement rapidly devolves into a laundry list of names, only to be completely shrugged off at the end of the chapter by noting the irreconcilable masculinity of the Black Power movement.

What is the point of his discussion of women’s roles in the Black Power movement? Does he succeed or is he too harsh? His conclusion seems to condemn Black Power after three whole chapters of backing it up. Additionally, I was a little disappointed by the extremely brief conclusion. I’m wondering whether or not anyone else thought that the way he ended the book focused more on the nature of social movements than the content he’d been discussing throughout the rest of the book.

By the end, it seems like Countryman is analyzing the nature of social movements/protests as a whole and using the Philadelphia Black Power movement as evidence of his theories rather than presenting a specific history of the movement. Is his notion—at least in the context of Black Power—that social revolt must inspire government revolt before bequeathing change valid? I might be consolidating this a bit too much, but I think his conclusion strives too much to make connections between Philadelphia and a broader movement that might not exist.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just found this book, and bought it because I like books on this topic. An interesting history, though I'm a little surprised that anyone would have bothered publishing this book. Not because its bad, but because its good (without really being all that assuming.) Something I find all too common with books from Ivy League publishing houses.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed, interesting view of the civil rights movement in Phila up to and including theelection of Wilson Goode and the MOVE bombing.

[AskHistorians]

Uses Philadelphia as a case study in order to explore the history of (and interactions between) the civil rights movement, black power movement, and urban development.